The King of Vodka

by Linda Himelstein

  Pyotr’s natural intensity, ambition, and focus seemed to thrive in Moscow. He noted how goods were priced, how they were marketed, why people bought what they did. He paid attention to it all, including Uncle Ivan’s penchant for vodka—even though it, like so many other things, was specifically forbidden.

  Since the time of Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, only state-owned distilleries and the gentry could produce vodka legally. The land-owning nobility received this privilege in 1765, which included a pass on taxes that accompanied liquor production. The law, eventually repealed in 1863, rarely stopped anyone from partaking in Russia’s great pastime. Villagers made their own home brews. And city businessmen, intent on earning a decent living, could find no better place to apply their entrepreneurial zeal than the nation’s pervasive vodka culture.

  Villagers and businessmen alike got away with this criminal behavior, for the most part, because it was simply too difficult—and too unpopular—to stop the vodka traffic. Officials happily accepted favors from the would-be felons. Peasants and the bourgeoisie frequented unsanctioned shops and pubs, hoping to buy better, cheaper vodka. And the tsar, who did not want to anger the lower classes by cutting off liquor sources, was willing to let things be.

  The situation, complex and corrupt, was one of many that paved the way for some of the most capitalistic advancements the nation had seen. Ivan, by now a well-respected, even prominent businessman, was only too happy to take advantage of the moment, bringing his sons and nephews along with him for the lucrative ride.

  PYOTR WAS GAINING valuable experience and earning more money than he had ever had. He was moving quickly through boyhood, maturing into a dashing, lanky man, with eyes that seemed to reach into the soul of anyone who could sustain his penetrating gaze. The fuzz on his face turned brittle, offering up the seeds for the dark, well-cropped beard that Pyotr would wear throughout most of his adult life. Within the community of serfs and beyond, Pyotr presented an attractive package. He was smart, ambitious, and determined. More than that, he could read, even write, albeit not well, according to his signed documents. This outside persona, combined with the fiercely private and reserved side of Pyotr Smirnov, made for a clean canvas on which people could sketch their own portraits of the man behind the handsome, serious face.

  Perhaps that is what attracted Nadezhda Yegorova to him when they met during one of Pyotr’s routine visits back home. Like so many other migrants, Pyotr regularly appeared in his village during the harvest and planting seasons. On these visits, he would carry back his earnings and present them to his father, Arseniy. As head of the family, he kept the Smirnov accounts, dividing the money as needed, always saving with an eye toward freedom.

  It was likely during one of these visits that Pyotr met Nadezhda. Not much is known about her other than she was the daughter of a church deacon from a large nearby village and a couple of years older than Pyotr. Nadezhda was also not a serf. As part of the clergy class, she sat above Pyotr’s station: Clergy maintained more comfortable lifestyles, in general, than those of peasants. Pyotr and Nadezhda married on May 21, 1850, when Pyotr was just nineteen years old.

  The marriage, like most at the time, was probably arranged by the family’s patriarchs. They would have deemed the union a win for both sides. The Smirnovs could attach themselves to a socially superior family while the Yegorovs gained ties to people with a foothold in Moscow and with promising economic prospects. Nonetheless, this marriage was still far from traditional.

  In nineteenth-century Russia, the mixing of classes was about as popular as the mixing of vodka. It simply was not done. And when it was done, the unions were fraught with risk. They could even be scandalous. That the Smirnovs would snub convention suggests that they were more progressive than most other peasants, at least when it furthered their own aspirations.

  The same could have been said about Count Nikolay Petrovich Sheremetev, whose romance with one of his serfs is perhaps the most infamous account of a mismatched coupling and its tragic ramifications. As the son and grandson of great men who were part of the inner circle of Russian royalty from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great, Nikolay was the epitome of high society. The Sheremetevs were the largest landowners in Russia, except for the tsar, and they had an army of more than 200,000 serfs. Their palaces were legendary and opulent, full of the finest European furnishings and the grandest artworks.

  Nikolay carried on the family’s noble tradition. He held the titles of count, senator, and marshal at various stages in his life. He was also a personal friend of Tsar Pavel I, dating back to their childhoods. Like his father, Nikolay was a leading patron of the arts, building opera houses, establishing theaters and troupes, and launching special drama schools aimed at educating serf children.

  Privately, Nikolay was every bit as notorious a playboy as some of his aristocratic brethren. He maintained a harem of serfs, women who often traveled with him and serviced him in any way he chose. Nikolay, short and thick-bodied but exceedingly charming, would peruse the rooms of his favored serf girls while they were working and drop a white handkerchief through the window of whomever he wanted to see that evening. He would then return to the room at night, satisfy his sexual desires and, before leaving, ask that his handkerchief be returned.3

  Nikolay’s promiscuity was nothing unusual for a noble, but his relationship with Praskovya was. She had come to sing for Nikolay when she was just seven years old. He was twenty-four. Nikolay was mesmerized by the girl’s melodious voice and delicate features, never mind that she was the daughter of a serf blacksmith. Sheremetev wanted to transform this child into a world-class actress and operatic diva. First, as he did with all his favorite serf actresses, Sheremetev changed Praskovya’s surname. He always preferred to call his starlets by names derived from precious stones. So Kovalyova became Zhemchugova, a name derived from zhemchug, meaning pearl. Nikolay saw to it that his jewel was educated by the best teachers money could buy. It did not take long for the girl to become one of the most beloved sopranos in all of Russia and a favorite of the emperor.

  Praskovya matured into an enchanting young woman. She was a natural beauty, with dark hair and milky white skin. It is not clear when Nikolay’s admiration for her artistic talents bloomed into a deep love, but that is what happened. The two had a tortured, secret affair, forbidden to show the true passion between them. It was not until Praskovya fell ill with tuberculosis that Nikolay overcame his devotion to society’s mores. He freed his serf and then, in secret, married her on November 6, 1801.

  Sadly, the union was brief. Praskovya died from tuberculosis just two years later—three weeks after giving birth to the couple’s only child, a son named Dmitriy.

  Sheremetev shocked Russian society by disclosing the marriage in a letter to the tsar after his wife’s death and asking that his son be recognized as his rightful heir. He also claimed that his wife had been a descendant of Polish nobility, a fiction he hoped would soften the blows he suspected might follow as the news of his marriage became public. It did not. Abandoned by his upper-crust friends, with few attending his wife’s funeral or expressing condolences, Nikolay died lonely and bitter in 1809. He summed up his anguish, writing “I thought I had friends who loved me, respected me, and shared my pleasures. But when my wife’s death put me in an almost desperate state, I found few people to comfort me and share my sorrow.”4

  The match between Pyotr and Nadezhda, was not nearly as controversial as some more famous love stories, but it was, nonetheless, unconventional. They were from distinctly different classes—and she was the older of the two. It is possible that they married simply because it was what their families ordered them to do. But it is also possible that Pyotr and Nadezhda shared a deep passion and love.

  For whatever reason, they carried on, like so many others, at a distance. Women often remained in the villages while their husbands worked in larger towns and cities. In Moscow, men outnumbered women by almost two to one. Still, Pyotr and Nadezhda wer
e together enough to produce their first child, a boy named Nikolay, on December 4, 1852. He died more than two months later from epilepsy, as church records show, a common affliction and cause of infant deaths at the time. Nadezhda was particularly shaken by the loss. She never got pregnant again and succumbed to a sudden fever just three years later.

  Pyotr, at only twenty-four, had buried a son and a wife. He threw himself into work, drowning his sorrows in the constant motions of daily living. He also stayed abreast of another politically pressing matter—the Crimean War. It was a devastating conflict that pitted Russia against a coalition comprised of the United Kingdom, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The dispute stemmed from unresolved issues in the Middle East, including the question of who would control some of the region’s holiest places. The consequences of this war, which produced one of Russia’s worst military defeats, would prove pivotal to the future of Russia—and to the Smirnovs as well.

  RUSSIA WAS DEVASTATED in the three-year Crimean battle. It lost 259,000 people to a better-financed, more sophisticated, well-trained enemy. While Russia still used flinty smoothbore muskets, its rivals fired the latest long-range rifled muskets. While Russia relied on a fleet of sailing vessels, its opposition sent a squadron of the more-modern screw-propelled warships. While the coalition was made up of skilled military leaders and loyal, well-trained foot soldiers, the Russian Army consisted largely of peasants and serfs called up to serve just as war broke out. They often fought for days without proper supplies or reinforcements because the country lacked a rail system that connected the economic and population centers with the battlefields.

  The famous 349-day siege of Sevastopol in 1854–55, in which a young Tolstoy fought, was a crushing blow to Russia’s esteem and international reputation—even though Russian soldiers held the city for nearly a year. In that battle, the Russians were overwhelmed; the technical shortcomings of the armory and national infrastructure were no longer a subject of wonder, they were an internally recognized fact. By the end of the Crimean War in 1856, the military powers of the Allies (British, French, Turkish) had humiliated Russia’s antiquated force—and bankrupted its treasury.

  Tsar Nikolay I had not prepared his nation for the confrontation. He had been too preoccupied with maintaining his military, monitoring an array of international conflicts, and attending to the inner workings of his own bulging government. The Russian bureaucracy swelled by some 40,000 people during his reign. So the tsar never fully grasped the idea that his country, still dominated by an agrarian economy, had fallen behind the rest of the world. The Crimean War made it impossible to overlook any longer.

  That realization, coupled with a regime change at the end of the war, offered the masses their first real hope of reform. Aleksander II, at age thirty-six, took control of Russia from his father in 1855. He was an educated, sensitive man who understood his country in a way Nikolay had not. He saw complacency among the gentry; he recognized an inadequate education system. He even observed the inability of millions of serfs to improve their own well-being—or the nation’s—under the status quo. Indeed, the restlessness of the underclasses had already bubbled to the surface, led by peasants who had volunteered for the army with the understanding that they would be granted freedom when the battles ended. When this did not happen, people took to the streets, and protests against the tsar and aristocracy erupted after the war.5 They demanded better treatment and screamed for freedom.

  Industrialization topped the state’s agenda, along with another crucial matter: the abolition of serfdom. The tsar acknowledged his intentions when he spoke passionately to a leading group of the aristocracy in Moscow on March 30, 1856. He hoped to win the nobility’s approval and support by famously stating the inevitable: “It is much better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below.” Freedom, finally, was in the air.

  All of this had been on the mind of Pyotr’s father, Arseniy. It had been some time since he had amassed enough reserves to pay off his master, but he had hesitated. Although Arseniy lacked the keen business mind that had served his brothers so well, he understood the art of good timing. Arseniy enjoyed a decent, productive relationship with his landowners and found little reason to uproot what remained of his family without a clear purpose. For him, as for many of the older generation, living under a master was secure and uncomplicated.

  Patience served Arseniy well. His sons were flourishing in Moscow, and the money they contributed to the family coffers made it possible, now, for Arseniy to be free. He could pay off his master, go to Moscow, and still have enough money left to join the merchant ranks himself. Plus, his landowner, wary of the government’s reformist tendencies, was in the mood to pocket a payout from his serfs before the tsar could impose restrictions.

  In 1857 Arseniy dipped into his savings, paid off his ransom, and said goodbye to the lands of Yaroslavl. The Smirnovs were free, now no longer anybody’s property. And soon, thanks to the new tsar’s enlightened agenda and the Smirnovs’ own tenacity, they would be much more than that.

  Chapter 3

  The Land of Darkness

  Arseniy could hardly wait to get a taste of the merchant life. He was a proud man who surely had felt more than a twinge of jealousy that his younger brothers had prospered years before him as free men while he, at age fifty-eight, was only now leaving behind his provincial roots and the burdens of serfdom.

  The first order of business for Arseniy was to prove to officials in Moscow, beyond a doubt, his devotion to Christian Orthodoxy. It was a requirement for becoming a merchant. This would not be difficult since Arseniy had attended church throughout his life, according to historical church records, confessing his sins and taking communion as often as his religion demanded. He socialized with local clergy, maintaining close ties to them even after leaving his village. And he dressed and acted the part of a conservative, pious Christian. Arseniy always embraced traditional Russian thinking and adhered to the church’s interpretations of societal norms, while maintaining patriarchal communities. He, like many others, shunned the blasphemous influences blowing in from Western and Central Europe to modernize.

  In the cool spring of 1858, Arseniy most likely headed to the parish his sons and brother Ivan attended on Varvarka Street to obtain a letter from the resident priest that would demonstrate his devotion. Perhaps he brought with him a succinct letter from his own village clergy, attesting to his allegiances. Among other things, it made clear that Arseniy would have no trouble swearing, in writing, that he was neither Jew nor eunuch nor a member of a variety of other “insidious” religious sects, as the law required.1

  Arseniy had not expected the church to be a stumbling block, but it was an entrenched institution and a notorious bureaucracy. Whether it would be weeks or months to process his request, nobody knows. But any delay must have weighed heavily on Arseniy. He was no longer a young man. True, he was in good health and had easily surpassed his country’s life expectancy for men of forty-four years, but he still had so much to do.

  Arseniy was worried about Pyotr. His other children were well down the road toward comfortable, pleasant lives. Yakov was entrenched in Uncle Ivan’s business, happily married, already the father of three daughters. Arseniy’s daughter Glafira had married well and presented no concerns. Although little is known about Aleksandra, his other daughter, it appears that she was also married and focused on her own family. But Pyotr was another matter. He had always adapted to his environment. Silently, however, he was never altogether comfortable. He kept waiting for something to happen, like a runner at the starting line listening for the one unmistakable pop that would thrust him into the race. Pyotr seemed to be simply biding his time, listening. Arseniy fervently hoped he could hasten the quest.

  By late April, the days had grown longer and warmer, typical for that time of year. Neither too hot nor too cold, the air was dry, the sky clear. It was during one of those tranquil days that
he finally collected the church’s recommendation. Now came the most challenging tasks.

  Becoming a merchant was arduous, almost Byzantine: The procedure itself dated back to the reign of Catherine the Great. Three guilds had been set up in 1775 and they were structured, like everything else in Russia, by class. Merchants were ranked from the wealthiest and most influential to the poorest and least consequential. Members of the prestigious, tightly knit first guild received special privileges and titles while those in the second and third guilds were restricted in which businesses they could enter and in the number of employees they could hire. Only first-guild merchants, for instance, could work in banking, export to foreign countries, and trade without limit with the Russian government. By contrast, third-guild merchants could not enter finance or heavy industry and had to limit the size of their companies to no more than thirty-two workers.2

  The strict three-guild hierarchy also allowed the state treasury to tax merchants according to their incomes and resources. When applying to one of the guilds, merchants were required to disclose their capital. Applicants routinely underreported what they had in order to pay the minimum tax. In addition, merchants were strongly encouraged to contribute to a fund purportedly dedicated to helping the poor. The idea was to absolve decent merchants of the guilt they harbored for being so rich, and, hopefully, improve their standing throughout society.